The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users. Due to the now ubiquitous nature of electronic communication devices, people of all ages and education levels are utilizing electronic devices to communicate with other individuals or contacts, receive services and/or share information, media and other content. One area in which there is a demand to increase ease of information transfer relates to geolocation services of communication devices. These geolocation services may be utilized to determine current locations of communication devices in the real-world. For a variety of reasons, it may be beneficial for a communication device to determine its current location. For example, applications of a communication device may request the current location of the communication device to enhance one or more services provided by the applications. Additionally, for example, the user of the communication device may desire to know the current location.
At present, most outdoor location systems use a Global Positioning System (GPS) which may compute a location of a communication device by triangulating distance to a set of satellites. However, GPS may only function well in outdoor regions with substantial sky visibility. For instance, a communication device may utilize a radio receiver for receiving GPS transmissions from satellites to estimate the current location of the communication device. However, it may be difficult for the communication device to receive the transmissions from the satellites in an indoor environment or in urban areas, for example. The difficulty in receiving the transmissions from the satellites in some instances may negatively impact the ability of the communication device to determine its current location. As such, alternative approaches may be utilized for detecting a current location of a communication device in instances in which GPS may be limited.
An example of an alternative approach for determining a current location of a communication device relates to analyzing radio frequency (RF) signals of wireless access points or signals from cellular towers. In this regard, for example, a communication device may detect signals received from one or more access points or cellular towers in an area of the communication device and the communication device may provide the data associated with the detected signals to a positioning system. The positioning system may analyze the data of the detected signals to estimate a current location for the communication device.
One problem with this approach of determining the location of a communication device is that it may not adequately preserve the privacy of a user of the communication device. For instance, by analyzing the data associated with the received signals from a communication device, a positioning system may be able to track locations of a user. However, there may be instances in which the user of the communication device desires that the information associated with the locations of the user remain private or at least to minimize access to the location information.
In view of the foregoing drawbacks, it may be beneficial to provide an efficient and reliable mechanism of determining one or more locations of a communication device and for more reliably preserving the privacy of the locations of the user.